The Best of Lucius Shepard (55 page)

“Nothin’,
baby,” he says. “I don’t want nothin’. I just called to tell you I’ll be
sendin’ money soon. Few weeks, maybe.”

“You
don’t have to. I’m makin’ it all right.”

“Don’t
tell me you can’t use a little extra. You got responsibilities.”

A
faded laugh. “I hear that.”

There
is silence for a few beats, then Mears says, “How’s your mama holdin’ up?”

“Not
so good. Half the time I don’t think she knows who I am. She goes to wanderin’
off sometimes, and I got to—” She breaks off, lets air hiss out between her
teeth. “I’m sorry, Bobby. This ain’t your trouble.”

That
stings him, but he does not respond directly to it. “Well, maybe I send you a
little somethin’, you can ease back from it.”

“I
don’t want to short you.”

“You
ain’t gon’ be shortin’ me, baby.” He tells her about Nazario, the twenty
thousand dollars, but not about Vederotta.

“Twenty
thousand!” she says. “They givin’ you twenty thousand for fightin’ a man you
say’s easy? That don’t make any sense.”

“Ain’t
like I’m just off the farm. I still got a name.”

“Yeah,
but you—”

“Don’t
worry about it,” he says angrily, knowing that she’s about to remind him he’s
on the downside. “I got it under control.”

Another
silence. He imagines that he can hear her irritation in the static on the line.

“But
I do worry,” she says. “God help me, I still worry about you after all this
time.”

“Ain’t
been that long. Three years.”

She
does not seem to have heard. “I still think about you under them lights gettin’
pounded on. And now you offerin’ me money you gon’ earn for gettin’ pounded on
some more.”

“Look
here—” he begins.

“Blood
money. That’s what it is. It’s blood money.”

“Stop
it,” he says. “You stop that shit. It ain’t no more blood money than any other
wage. Money gets paid out, somebody always gettin’ fucked over at the end of
it. That’s just what money is. But this here money, it ain’t comin’ ‘cause of
nothin’ like that, not even ‘cause some damn judge said I got to give it. It’s
coming from me to you ‘cause you need it and I got it.”

He
steers the conversation away from the topic of fighting, gets her talking about
some of their old friends, even manages to get her laughing when he tells her
how the cops caught Sidney Bodden and some woman doing the creature in Sidney’s
car in the parking lot of the A&P. The way she laughs, she tips her head
and tucks her chin down onto her shoulder and never opens her mouth, just makes
these pleased, musical noises like a shy little girl, and when she lifts her
head, she looks so innocent and pretty he wants to kiss her, grazes the
receiver with his lips, wishes it would open and let him pour through to her
end of the line. The power behind the wish hits his heart like a mainlined
drug, and he knows she still loves him, he still loves her, this is all wrong,
this long-distance shit, and he can’t stop himself from saying, “Baby, I want
to see you again.”

“No,”
she says.

It
is such a terminal, door-slamming no, he can’t come back with anything. His
face is hot and numb, his arms and chest heavy as concrete, he feels the same
bewildered, mule-stupid helplessness as he did when she told him she was
leaving. He wonders if she’s seeing somebody, but he promises himself he won’t
ask.

“I
just can’t, Bobby,” she says.

“It’s
all right, baby,” he says, his voice reduced to a whisper. “It’s all right. I
got to be goin’.”

“I’m
sorry, I really am sorry. But I just can’t.”

“I’ll
be sending you somethin’ real soon. You take care now.”

“Bobby?”

He
hangs up, an effort, and sits there turning to stone. Brooding thoughts glide
through his head like slow black sails. After a while he lifts his arms as if
in an embrace. He feels Amandla begin to take on shape and solidity within the
circle of his arms. He puts his left hand between her shoulder blades and
smooths the other along her flanks, following the arch of her back, the tight
rounds of her ass, the columned thighs, and he presses his face against her
belly, smelling her warmth, letting all the trouble and ache of the fight with
the Cuban go out of him. All the weight of loss and sadness. His chest seems to
fill with something clear and buoyant. Peace, he thinks, we are at peace.

But
then some sly, peripheral sense alerts him to the fact that he is a fool to
rely on this sentimental illusion, and he drops his arms, feeling her fading
away like steam. He sits straight, hands on knees, and turns his head to the
side, his expression rigid and contemptuous as it might be during a staredown
at the center of a boxing ring. Since the onset of his blindness, he has never
been able to escape the fear that people are spying on him, but lately he has
begun to worry that they are not.

*
* *

For
once Leon has not lied. The fight with Nazario is a simple contest of wills and
left hooks, and though the two men’s hooks are comparable, Mears’ will is by
far the stronger. Only in the fourth round does he feel his control slipping,
and then the face of a hooded serpent materializes where Nazario’s face should
be, and he pounds the serpent image with right leads until it vanishes. Early
in the fifth round, he bulls Nazario into a corner, and following a sequence of
twelve unanswered punches, the ref steps in and stops it.

Two
hours after the fight, Mears is sitting in the dimly lit bar on the bottom
floor of his hotel, having a draft beer and a shot of Gentleman Jack, listening
to Mariah Carey on the jukebox. The mirror is a black, rippling distance
flocked by points of actinic light, a mysterious lake full of stars and no sign
of his reflection. The hooker beside him is wearing a dark something sewn all
over with spangles that move over breasts and hips and thighs like the
scattering of moonlight on choppy water. The bartender, when he’s visible at
all, is a cryptic shadow. Mears is banged up some, a small but nasty cut at his
hairline from a head butt and a knot on his left cheekbone, which the hooker is
making much of, touching it, saying, “That’s terrible-lookin’, honey. just
terrible. You inna accident or somepin’?” Mears tells her to mind her own damn
business, and she says, “Who you think you is, you ain’t my business? You
better quit yo’ dissin’ ‘cause I ain’t takin’ that kinda shit from nobody!”

He
buys her another drink to mollify her and goes back to his interior concerns.
Although the pain from the fight is minimal, his eyes are acting up and there
is a feeling of dread imminence inside his head, an apprehension of a slight
wrongness that can bloom into a fiery red presence. He is trying, by
maintaining a certain poise, to resist it.

The
hooker leans against him. Her breasts are big and sloppy soft and her perfume
smells cheap like flowered Listerine, but her waist is slender and firm, and
despite her apparent toughness, he senses that she is very young, new to the
life. This barely hardened innocence makes him think of Amandla.

“Don’t
you wan’ go upstairs, baby?” she says as her hand traces loops and circles
along the inside of his thigh.

“We
be there soon enough,” he says gruffly. “We got all night.”

“Whoo!”
She pulls back from him. “I never seen a young man act so stern! ‘Mind me of my
daddy!” From her stagy tone, he realizes she is playing to the other patrons of
the place, whom he cannot see, invisible as gods on their bar stools. Then she
is rubbing against him again, saying, “You gon’ treat me like my daddy, honey?
You gon’ be hard on me?”

“Listen
up,” he says quietly, putting a hand on her arm. “Don’t you be playin’ these
games. I’m payin’ you good, so you just sit still and we’ll have a couple drinks
and talk a little bit. When the time comes, we’ll go upstairs. Can you deal
with that?”

He
feels resentment in the tension of her arm. “OK, baby,” she says with casual
falsity. “What you wan’ talk about?”

Mariah
Carey is having a vision of love, her sinewy falsetto going high into a gospel
frequency, and Mears asks the hooker if she likes the song.

She
shrugs. “It’s all right.”

“You
know the words?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sing
it with me?”

“Say
what?”

He
starts to sing, and after a couple of seconds the hooker joins in. Her voice is
slight and sugary but blends well with Mears’ tenor. As they sing, her
enthusiasm grows and Mears feels a frail connection forming between them. When
the record ends, she giggles, embarrassed, and says, “That was def, baby. You
sing real good. You a musician?”

“Naw,
just church stuff, you know.”

“Bobby
Mears!” A man’s voice brays out behind him, a hand falls heavily onto his
shoulder. “Goddamn, it is you! My fren’, he saying, ‘Ain’t that Bobby Mears
over there?’ and I said, ‘Shit, what he be doin’ in here?’ “

The
man is huge, dark as a coal sack against the lesser darkness, and Mears has no
clue to his identity.

“Yes,
sir! Bobby ‘the Magician’ Mears! I’m your biggest fan, no shit! I seen you
fight a dozen times. And I ain’t talkin’ TV. I mean in person. Man, this is
great! Can I get you a drink? Lemme buy you one. Hey, buddy! Give us another
round over here, OK?”

“‘Nother
draft, ‘nother shot of the Gentleman,” says the bartender in a singsong
delivery as he pours. He picks up the hooker’s glass and says with less flair,
“Vodka and coke.”

“Sister,”
the man says to the hooker, “I don’t know what Bobby’s been tellin’ you, but
you settin’ next to one of the greatest fighters ever lived.”

The
hooker says, “You a fighter, baby?” and Mears, who has been seething at this
interruption, starts to say it’s time to leave, but the man talks through him.

“The
boy was slick! I’m tellin’ you. Slickest thing you ever seen with that jab of
his. Like to kill Marvin Hagler. That old baldhead was one lucky nigger that
night. Ain’t it the truth, man?”

“Bullshit,”
Mears says.

“Man’s
jus’ bein’ modest.”

“I
ain’t bein’ modest. Hagler was hurtin’ me from round one, and all I’s doin’ was
tryin’ to survive.” Mears digs a roll of bills from his pocket, peels a twenty
from the top—the twenties are always on top; then the tens, then the fives.
“Anybody saw that fight and thinks Hagler was lucky don’t know jack shit.
Hagler was the best, and it don’t make me feel no better ‘bout not bein’ the
best, you comin’ round and bullshittin’ me.”

“Be
cool, Bobby! All right, man? Be cool.”

The
hooker caresses Mears’ shoulders, his neck, and he feels the knots of muscle,
like hard tumors. It would take a thousand left hooks to work out that tension,
a thousand solid impacts to drain off the poisons of fear lodged there, and he
experiences a powerful welling up of despair that seems connected to no memory
or incident, no stimulus whatsoever, a kind of bottom emotion, one you would
never notice unless the light and the temperature and the noise level, all the
conditions, were just right. But it’s there all the time, the tarry stuff that
floors your soul. He tells the man he’s sorry for having lashed out at him.
He’s tired, he says, got shit on his mind.

“Hey,”
says the man, “hey, it’s not a problem, OK?”

There
follows a prickly silence that ends when Aaron Neville comes on the jukebox.
Mears goes away with the tune, with the singer’s liquid shifts and drops, like
the voice of a saxophone, and is annoyed once again when the man says, “Who you
fightin’ next, Bobby? You got somethin’ lined up?”

“Vederotta,”
Mears says.